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How to Fix Blurry Pictures

Ever wonder how some photographers seem to have tack-sharp photos why yours seem soft and fuzzy around the areas you thought you focused on? There are many reasons for this, but one thing most people don’t think of is if their lenses are calibrated to their camera. It is very easy to do and takes only a few minutes.

First you will need a calibration pyramid. You can Google how to make a home-made one, which I tried to do and it was fairly difficult and cumbersome to the point that I gave up and ended up ordering this one from Amazon for less than six dollars.

To determine if your camera’s auto-focus system needs some fine-tuning or not place your camera’s center focal point to the top center target on the pyramid and take a shot. Next, zoom in on the shot to see where your focus lies along the left hand ruler.

You can see in the image below that the lens was back focusing at this point because the focus was clear along the numbers behind the zero. The goal is to have zero be your center focal point.

To adjust for this you need to go into the menu settings of your camera and find where you can adjust the auto-focus (AF) of your camera. Adjusting it in the positive direction will move the focal point away from the camera while adjusting it in a negative direction will move the focal point toward the camera. So, in the example above I had to adjust the setting to a negative fourteen (-14) to get the following result:

As you can see, my focal point is now nicely centered on zero.

In a real world example, it can mean the difference between this photo:

versus this photo:

Calibration is specific to each lens for each camera body. In other words, you will need to calibrate each lens to every camera body you use. The camera will remember the settings when you interchange lenses in the future up to a certain number of lenses depending on your camera manufacturer.

Calibration is just one way you can achieve sharp-focused photos. There are many other factors that go into it as well. Photography is definitely not as simple as it seems. Let me take care of the hard stuff and give you the great portraits you want without the hassle of you having to learn all the technical stuff.